Genre is cumulative. Successful elements of one film are picked up,
refined, and tweaked by the next. Sometimes the result is an
improvement or even an advancement, other times it is imitation or
homage. In many cases, a film will combine the perceived successes of
its predecessors, synthesizing them into something familiar but new.
These are the places where genre evolves. Take the case of The
Vampire Bat, which borrows two of the stars of Doctor X and Mystery
of the Wax Museum, but more importantly, it carries forward some of
the themes and genre trappings of Universal's 1931 horror hits,
Dracula and Frankenstein. In doing so, the film shows some innovation
of its own, resulting in an entertaining, if occasionally slipshod
film.

The Vampire Bat has very little to do with the title animals.
Certainly there is an infestation of bats in the village of
Kleinschloss, but the townspeople are more concerned with actual
vampires. One can scarcely blame them -- people keep turning up dead,
drained of blood, with two puncture woundsin their neck.
Investigator Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas)
knows that there must be a rational explanation for the killings.
With the help of his girlfriend, Ruth (Fay Wray), and her employer,
eminent scientist Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill), Karl soon
comes to believe that the truth may be more fantastic than he could
have possibly anticipated.

Given the popularity of both
Dracula and Frankenstein, it was only a matter of time before some
film came along that tried to marry elements from both. The Vampire
Bat is just that movie. Beyond the obvious use of vampire lore, The
Vampire Bat's debt to Dracula also extends to its use of a Van
Helsing style vampire expert in the form of Doctor Von Niemann, some
wide-eyed hypnosis, and a tendency to run exposition through very
talky drawing room conversations. From Frankenstein, there's the
middle European setting (using the same backlot sets, no less), mobs
of villagers with torches, and, later in the film, some science
fiction elements.

Solidifying The Vampire Bat's relationship to both films is Dwight
Frye (Renfield in Dracula and Fritz in Frankenstein), featured as
Herman, a simple-minded man suspected of being the town vampire. Frye
is often positioned in a way that recalls one of the two films. For
instance, there is the shot Herman peers through a gate in a manner
very similar to the opening scene of Frankenstein. Herman also has an obsession with bats and blood, which harkens back to Frye's role as Renfield.

However, all of that is window dressing.The most interesting
result of the combination of elements from Dracula and Frankenstein
is the conflict between reason and superstition. While this was a
minor element in Dracula and had a slightly larger presence in
Frankenstein (couched more as science vs. religion), here it is a
constant tension underlying everything. The people of Kleinschloss
"know" there is a vampire among them. No amount of reason or
evidence to the contrary will dissuade them, and every tiny bit of
proof that confirms their already held beliefs is seized upon and
clung to.As one villager says after yet another local is
murdered, "Kringen said Herman (the suspected vampire)would
get him and he did." Never mind that there's no proof that Herman
was anywhere near the scene of the crime. In the minds of the
villagers, the fulfillment of one part of the prediction proves the
whole of it.

Navigating through the village's superstitious waters is Karl, who
is visually set apart from them by his metropolitan dress style. His
nicer clothes and intelligent speech set him as the voice of reason,
a rare thing in Kleinschloss. However, Karl's status as the
reasonable one is a feint by the filmmakers -- eventually, with some
prodding from Niemann, he comes around to the idea that vampires may
be real. In fact, The Vampire Bat may be the first example of a
particular kind of horror plot that exemplifies the tension between
reason and superstition, one that would be repeated in several Hammer
vampire films in the 1960s and 1970s. In this plot, the one
reasonable man surrounded by superstitious common folk learns, often
with the help of a wise expert, that his rationality means nothing in
the face of an actual supernatural threat. This basic outline is
still being used today; it appears in a somewhat modified form in
this year's The Woman in Black.

The Vampire Bat pulls out a surprise twist on its own formula in the
third act (spoilers for The Vampire Bat will be prevalent from this
point on in the review). After our hero has begun to pursue the
possibility that a vampire is at work, the expert he has relied on,
Dr. Niemann, is revealed to
be the actual villain. There are no supernatural forces at work --
Niemann is a regular mad scientist, bent on creating new life (more
shades of Frankenstein). The tissue he's developed in the lab needs
blood, so he's hypnotized his lab assistant, Emil, to kidnap
townspeople so he can steal theirs. As it turns out, Karl was correct
from the start -- the explanations for the murders was rational.
Well, rational within the world of the film, anyway.

The reveal also turns what had been a plot weakness into a strength.
The idea of a logical-minded scientist like Dr. Niemann supporting a
theory as fantastic as vampires seems odd. However, knowing his role
in the murders, it makes sense that he would try to direct the
investigation away from himself by feeding the local superstition. On
review, his tactics are delightfully insidious. Karl has rejected the
villagers' tales of monsters, partially because they seem so
unreasonable. Niemann uses his veneer of respectable rationality to
good effect, peppering his tales of bloodsucking ghouls with phrases
like "according to accepted theory", adding authority where no
real authority exists. Once one is aware of the twist, rewatching
Atwill's act as a master manipulator is a real joy. Unfortunately,
while the twist is of great retroactive benefit, it also ruins the
character for the rest of the film. Once all cards are on the table,
Niemann becomes another monologuing madman who leers at pretty girls
before tying them up. His motivations also seem pretty thin for a
fellow as intelligent as he's been revealed to be.

Poor Herman fares much worse than Niemann, however, being poorly
written and (I hate to say this of any Dwight Frye performance) acted
throughout all of his scenes. Herman's clearly meant to be
analogous to Dracula's Renfield, but instead of being mad, he's
mentally challenged. To show his cognitive dysfunction, Herman speaks
in an improbably inconsistent syntax. Within a single scene, he'll
refer to himself as "Herman", "I", or "me". Frye doesn't
deliver the garbled sentences with any sort of authenticity and the
words hang in the air like dissonant musical notes.

Behind the camera, director Frank R. Strayer is about as uneven as
Herman's speech patterns. He opens the movie with a creepy series
of shots that culminate in a chilling scream. It's the perfect
mood-setter, but the mood dissipates with the static, overly talky
exposition scenes that follow. The rest of the film follows this
basic pattern. When Strayer is working on macabre visuals, he's
absolutely aces, doing some of the best work of the era. However,
these sequences are few and far between. Whenever characters have to
talk, and they often do, the scenes are stagey and plodding. Since
Strayer had started out in the silent era, one wonders if he was
simply more comfortable doing complex visual work without sound,
since he is clearly capable of great visuals. Whatever the reason, it
remains disappointing that Strayer's talent is only apparent in
limited doses in The Vampire Bat.

In combining elements of Dracula and Frankenstein, The Vampire Bat
puts forth its own lasting advancements in the horror genre. Future
films then take what The Vampire Bat does and twist it into
new and different configurations. On and on this process goes, each
film flowing into the next over the course of the 20th century and
into the 21st. When we watch modern horror films, we know that some part of their
DNA comes from renowned classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, and Night of the Living Dead, yes. But there is also genetic material from the little films, the scrappy unsung independent films
like The Vampire Bat, that took from the greats and then refined what
they took and made it better or at least different. They weren't always great films, but they are no less
important to the history of horror films. And after all, isn't that
what we're here to celebrate?

Solidifying The Vampire Bat's relationship to both films is Dwight
Frye (Renfield in Dracula and Fritz in Frankenstein), featured as
Herman, a simple-minded man suspected of being the town vampire. Frye
is often positioned in a way that recalls one of the two films. For
instance, there is the shot Herman peers through a gate in a manner
very similar to the opening scene of Frankenstein. Herman also has an obsession with bats and blood, which harkens back to Frye's role as Renfield.

However, all of that is window dressing.The most damessokken interesting
result of the combination of elements from Dracula and Frankenstein
is the conflict between reason and superstition. While this was a
minor element in Dracula and had a slightly larger presence in
Frankenstein (couched more as science vs. religion), here it is a
constant tension underlying everything. The people of Kleinschloss
"know" there is a vampire among them. No amount of reason or
evidence to the contrary will dissuade them, and every tiny bit of
proof that confirms their already held beliefs is seized upon and
clung to.As one villager says after yet another local is
murdered, "Kringen said Herman (the suspected vampire)would
get him and he did." Never mind that there's no proof that Herman
was anywhere near the scene of the crime. In the minds of the
villagers, the fulfillment of one part of the prediction proves the
whole of it.